Review by Frank Plowright

At twelve Effie has already experienced the trauma of her mother dying and being moved to Brooklyn and the care of two elderly relatives. As seen in Witches of Brooklyn, that opened up a whole new magical world to her, and it seems she’s inherited the family talent for witchcraft. It’s just as well she has her Aunts Carlota and Selimene to guide her, plus ghostly family librarian Francis as the guardian of the spell books and a more structured teacher.

Sophie Escabasse immediately broadens Effie’s world by establishing there are several other witches in the Brooklyn area, and different supernatural threats can manifest. It’s bad luck, for instance, to set up your business in a location with sleeping dragon beneath. Also broadened is the ethnic balance of the cast, with Effiee’s friend Berrit’s new neighbour Garance, who’s one of two problems for Effie as Berrit no longer seems interested in her. The other is a street intersection where a new statue has appeared, and where things just seem to go wrong for people.

Escabasse’s illustrations have all the charm of the first outing, but compared to that What the Hex?! takes a long while to get going, circling around the same subjects slowly. Even allowing for Witches of Brooklyn being aimed at younger readers, it still takes too long to reach both the crisis point and the concentration on Effie’s feelings about Garance means the problems at the intersection are very much secondary. That does have a cheerfully neat resolution, but another downside is once Escabesse opens her story up, some characters are just discarded as no longer relevant, and that shouldn’t happen. There is closure, but it’s clumsily tacked on right near the end.

The drawing has just the right appeal, but one hopes S’More Magic pays more attention to the actual storytelling.